Frances Goitsemang Baard was born Frances Maswabi (or Masuabi), in Green Point, Beaconsfield, Kimberley, on 1 October 1909. She attended the Racecourse Primary School, the Lyndhurst Road School in Malay Camp, Kimberley, and St Cyprian’s “Perseverance” School.. She trained as a teacher and obtained a post at a Paardeberg mission school, a position that she retained for only a year until a male teacher was available. She was then replaced. Frances then became a domestic servant in Port Elizabeth.

Moving to Port Elizabeth, work in a factory context and her experiences of oppression and exploitation led to her active involvement and eventually a leading role in trade unionism and in the ANC. She joined the ANC in 1948 and became very involved with the ANC Women’s League. During the 1952 Defiance campaign she was asked to organize Home Care for the men and women who had been imprisoned for their part in the said campaign and was an organiser of the African National Congress Women's League (ANCWL). 

The Federation of South African women was formed on 17th April 1954 and was elected President of the Port Elizabeth branch. She participated in the boycott of Bantu Education in 1955 and assisted in the potato boycott in response to the use of past offenders as labourers on potato farms in the Bethal district. She was also national treasurer of the Women's League and on the executive committee of the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW) in the mid-1950s.

She was involved in the drafting of the Freedom Charter in Kliptown in 1955. She was part of the 20,000 strong march of women on the Union buildings (Pretoria) on 9th August 1956 to protest against passes for women. On 18th October 1956 she was arrested and charged with treason, but later released.

She was detained in 1960 and again in 1963 when she was held for 12 months in solitary confinement. In 1964, she was sentenced to five years imprisonment for ANC activities and in terms of the Suppression of Communism Act. After her release in 1969, she was banned and restricted to Mabopane near Pretoria. Here she was linguistically foreign, without shelter, far from her home and family.
In the 1980s, Frances worked with the United Democratic Front (UDF), a body that was formed bringing together civic workers, churches and other organisations to oppose the introduction of Botha’s Tricameral Parliament.

Explaining the “dompas” – by which the pass laws were implemented – Baard was to write: “A pass is this little book you must get when you are 16 and it says where you can work, and where you can be, and if you have got work. You can't get a job without this book. And you can only get a job where they stamp your pass to say 'Johannesburg' or 'Pretoria' and so on. You must carry it with you all the time because the police can ask you, 'Where is your pass?' any time, and then you must show them. If you haven't got your pass, they put you in jail for some days or else you must pay some money to get out."  (Frances Baard, in "My Spirit is not Banned”). 

Frances Baard died 1997, Mabopane, Gauteng, South Africa. In June 2001, the "Diamantveld District Council" was renamed Frances Baard District Municipality in her honour. Honouring this daughter of Kimberley, and her role in the 1956 Women's March, a bronze statue of Frances Baard was unveiled in Kimberley at the corner of Bultfontein and Lennox Roads by Northern Cape Premier Hazel Jenkins on 9 August 2009. The inscription on the granite plinth cites the famous remark from her autobiography: "My spirit is not banned – I still say I want freedom in my lifetime.”